Vinny Steed from Galway, Ireland has work published abroad and at home. His poems have appeared in the Galway Review, Headstuff, Skylight 47, Crannog, Into the Void, Tales from the Forest magazine, Ogham Stone, Ofi Press magazine, ROPES, All the Sins, Flight, Boyne Berries and Poems in Profile. Some of his poems have featured in Windows 25th edition and in Cinnamon Press anthology. He is currently working towards a first collection.
We watch waves crash from a rickety bench,
ancient rumbles of a vanquished sea god. Marvel
how hair on legs see-saws like sea anemone on the
breeze. How a ninety-three-million-mile journey
highlights auburn shapes on the hillside, where cats make
beds with the lizards. Up here light has danced the rocks
ragged and men dared to build one-thousand-year old
monuments, stone heaped upon stone-a stacked callous
straining under its own weight. Hands careful not a drop
of blood would mingle in the Holy fountain.
The rafters finding home among the cosmos.
Where for hundreds of years its builders would find numbers
in nature and in the stars-an instruction manual for living
In this the postcard moment of their lives.
Isis
As one accustomed to board games
the art of picking garlic and cobalt skies
Isis could find no delight in her husband’s body
parts now scattered wide and far, playing hide-and-seek amongst
the lotus, date palms, and papyrus, and by her side
the dead weight of her sweetly-singing basket – the penis long
since lost to fatten the gut of an oxyrhyncus fish, days down
at the palace on hands and knees, how she wished his wooden
coffin succumbed to squally seas, no scent of rotting
flesh at the base of a tamarisk tree.
For what woman, she wondered
has love to give a slivered man?
In the living land what love has a missing
piece to offer such a woman?
Poetry in this post: © Vinny Steed
Published with the permission of Vinny Steed